Hamster Marketplace’s Experience in Creating Community

February 28, 2018

The success of any modern project is to some extent measured by the size of its audience. That is what defines how profitable and powerful the proposed service, product, or app will be. The Hamster Marketplace team has developed its own strategy for attracting and retaining users and forming a community around the marketplace, a strategy we will share in this post.

Kickstarter Startups and Their Audience

Hamster Marketplace is oriented toward recent crowdfunding projects from Kickstarter and other similar platforms. According to our estimates, each Kickstarter project in the electronics category has an average audience of 1380 people. If a partnership began between such a vendor and Hamster Marketplace, the former could bring along about one third of its own audience, which is about 460 people. We are citing the most pessimistic figures here to avoid setting these expectations too high.

By attracting their own users, the electronics manufacturers acquire an understandable and convenient retail platform and are freed from the expenses associated with creating their own stores. But much more important is what we call audience interpenetration.

Imagine a situation where one hundred projects bring 460 people each from their own audiences to Hamster Marketplace, offering an easy and convenient way to acquire their products. And these newly minted manufacturers are not just working to further their own product, but also supporting their neighbors: almost all vendors who will operate on Hamster Marketplace have audiences with similar interests. But most important is that the platform will host real manufacturers with their own products, not first-stage startups.

If we reframe this situation in numbers, we have 276 thousand users from just 600 vendors (if funds raised during the crowdsale reach a soft cap of $2 million). According to our estimates, each user will make 0.4 purchases per year, which puts the retail volume of the marketplace for the same period at $14.35 million. If we raise $7 million, we get 900 vendors and an initial audience of 414 thousand buyers (0.5 purchases per person), which gives $26.91 million in sales volume in the first year. As you can see, the higher the number of vendors, the more active the users, due to the exchange of experience and opinions.

From Early Adopters to a Wide Audience

The audience for any project always begins from some core or backbone, which we talked about earlier in attracting the audiences of the vendors themselves. The bigger and more numerous the core, the faster the service will grow and the more successful it will ultimately be. The size of the initial audience at a project’s launch determines how many people will use the service at its peak popularity. Of course, there are known exceptions, where individual projects and their audiences grew practically without end, but in Hamster Marketplace’s case, with it being a niche project, that is physically impossible.

Early adopters on their own are insufficient to form a fully fledged audience, but it is their level of engagement that demonstrates how much the project can be trusted. The average consumer is suspicious and skittish: it’s risky to buy something on a new platform, especially when eBay, Amazon, or AliExpress are right there. It will be the initial audience from vendors that will facilitate the necessary trust in the platform, which will transform into trust from the average consumer.

Classic marketing tools will play a sizable role in this process. Hamster Marketplace is not against using “common” tools for generating leads, using context advertising, spots on mass media, overviews, and other mechanisms for increasing the audience. However, advertising cannot be effective without a real user experience from early users, which the general public can use to make their decision that the platform is worth its attention and trust. To sum up, we are considering the following channels for attracting users:

the manufacturers’ own audience (about 460 people per vendor);

the audience overlap effect due to similar views and interests;

classic lead generation tools;

a competitive and transparent mechanism for the marketplace’s operations.

The only possible path for well-balanced development is to gradually transition from the vendors’ individual audiences to a monolithic community of buyers, a portion of whom came directly from outside.

Internal Mechanics of Hamster Marketplace

Establishing a trusting relationship between buyer and seller is extremely important, but it’s even better when both also have “fallback” systems that are regulated by the marketplace itself as an impartial and independent actor.

We believe that one of the advantages of Hamster Marketplace for buyers will be the blockchain-based intelligent delivery and defect monitoring systems. Why blockchain? First and foremost, because the blockchain is an unchangeable structure that eliminates the very possibility of outside tampering. Blockchain guarantees to buyers that they will receive only complete and truthful information on the manufacturer, and to manufacturers that their merits and flawless work will not remain hidden.

Product uniqueness, transparent operations, and honesty toward users are the principles governing how the decentralized retail platformHamster Marketplaceoperates. And it is these three principles, along with the marketing steps and mechanisms for attracting an audience described above, that will underpin the marketplace’s inevitable success with buyers and tech fans.

This is a sponsored press release and does not necessarily reflect the opinions or views held by any employees of The Merkle. This is not investment, trading, or gambling advice. Always conduct your own independent research.